


A Workshop of Her Own

by madwriteson



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-10
Updated: 2019-10-10
Packaged: 2020-12-12 04:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 835
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20978966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madwriteson/pseuds/madwriteson
Summary: A brief character study of May Parker from Into the Spider-Verse.





	A Workshop of Her Own

The first time May Reilly met Olivia Octavius, she was TAing a first year physics course. There Liv was, all gangly limbs and bony elbows, a bright, big-eyed fifteen-year-old, ready to learn, so full of questions beyond the scope of the class that she was bursting at the seams with them. Liv would corner May during her office hours and ask them, question after question, some so far beyond May’s own scope of knowledge that all May could say at the time was “I don’t know. Let me see if I can find out.”

Sometimes no one knew the answers, and Liv’s response to that was always, “Don’t worry, May. _I’ll_ find out. Some day.”

She was charming, in the way of all bright fifteen-year-olds, but May worried about her. Sometimes the world was not kind to such children, especially when they were female as well.

Two years later, May was searching for a tenure-track job and Liv had moved on to graduate school, halfway across the country. May kept an eye out for Liv as best as she could over the next few years, making introductions, doing a first pass on some of Liv’s research papers. But eventually, they drifted apart, only meeting in passing at conferences.

May got her tenure and married Ben Parker.

Liv started her third Ph.D..

Liv called May up one day, almost a decade after they had drifted apart. “I’m in town for a job interview,” she said. “Want to get a coffee?”

“All right.”

Liv was still so much as May had remembered her, still enthralled, enraptured by the mysteries the universe had to offer her, still bursting at the seams with ideas and questions and _excitement_. Somehow, over the years, May had forgotten how to be excited like that.

“Are you happy?” Liv asked, close to the end of their conversation. “You used to have such a spark, May. Where did that go?”

May couldn’t answer her.

But when she went home to Ben, in the little apartment they still shared after all of these years, she realized that she wasn’t happy, that she hadn’t been for so long, that she had lost her spark, that she’d been stuck in a rut, just doing the research she needed to do to keep tenure, when what she really wanted was to _make_ things. She poured her heart out to Ben, her frustration, the feeling she couldn’t shake that she wasn’t doing all that she was capable of doing.

Ben listened in his steady, capable way, and he nodded when she was done. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

Two months later, Ben loaded May into a taxi and took her out to the suburbs, to a house. Ben had the keys.

“Do you own this place?” May asked with a frown. It wasn’t like Ben to make major financial decisions without her input, and buying a house was most definitely a major financial decision.

“Not yet. I know the realtor. She let me borrow the keys.” And then he lead her through the house, to the back yard, to a small shed, he undid the padlock on the door, he reached down to the corrugated steel that covered the floor and pulled it up, revealing a set of rickety metal stairs, leading down into the dark. “It’s an old bunker. Pretty sizable. Some paranoid fellow must have had it put in during the cold war.” He paused, and fiddled with the ring of keys, a nervous tic that May rarely saw because Ben was so seldom nervous. “I thought we might turn it into an engineering lab. For you. If you wanted.”

May thought she had never loved him so much in her life.

They bought the house.

And three years later, when Ben’s brother and sister-in-law died, leaving behind their young son Peter, it was no great sacrifice for May to leave her tenure behind. After all, she had a lab of her own now.

May had never wanted to be a mother, but mothering Peter came easily to her. After all, he was a smart kid, and May was more than happy to answer any questions he came to her with. Sometimes Ben would smile as he listened to the two of them, and say “Sometimes I think it’s you he’s related to, not me, with a brain like that.”

Peter reminded her of Liv, just a little.

She tried to keep him away from her lab at first, away from the engineering projects she’d started to patent, away from the experimental chemical mixes and synthesized substances. But she realized eventually that it was just easier to bring Peter along, to teach him about what she was doing as she worked.

Sometimes she wondered now if Peter would have lived if she hadn’t done that.

Sometimes she wondered if he would have died even sooner without it.

And sometimes she knew that it didn't matter, because Peter had always wanted more.

Because so had she.


End file.
